IBM's Bob Balaban Looks at Lotusphere
If you’re interested to learn how Lotusphere has evolved over 13 years, Bob Balaban is the man to see.

Balaban spoke at the very first Lotusphere in 1993 and continued speaking at the show for the next several years, leading as many as five sessions per show. In 1997 he left IBM to start his own IBM Lotus Notes consultancy, but continued attending Lotusphere as a Business Partner – and, after a few years off, resumed leading sessions at the show. Then he rejoined IBM in 2005, and at Lotusphere 2006 he led a whopping eight sessions.

“I think eight might be a record; it was certainly a record for me,” says Balaban. “It’s not a record I’m out to match or break any time soon.”

Balaban attended his first Lotusphere almost as an afterthought. “I was on a small team working on adding LotusScript and agents to Lotus Notes,” he says. “My boss was going to do a presentation on the topic but backed out, and he offered me the chance to go in his place. I figured what the heck – the show was in DisneyWorld, I had two small children, and it would be a cool, employer-subsidized family vacation.”

What he got was just a so-so vacation (“I couldn’t spend anytime with the kids during the day, and my wife and I were exhausted at night”), but a tremendous experience at the conference.

“The one thing I’ll always remember at that first Lotusphere was the wild enthusiasm about the whole thing,” he says. “We were worried about how many people would show up, but in the end it was between three and four thousand, which was huge for a Lotus conference in those days. I remember being impressed that we had the MGM theme park closed to everyone but conference attendees for a party, which was pretty cool.

“But what really surprised me,” he continues, “was how crazy people went over my session on LotusScript and agents. Remember, this was in the days when 1-2-3 and SmartSuite were still the big moneymakers for Lotus. It was a great experience for me as a speaker.”

Over the next few years, attendance – and attendee enthusiasm – only grew.

“Attendees were so hungry for information,” says Balaban. “As the years went on they started pursuing Lotus people as they walked through the halls, at dinner, everywhere. I literally had one guy follow me into a men’s room to ask me a programming question.”

When he began attending Lotusphere as a Business Partner, Balaban understood this enthusiasm first-hand.

“If you’re not an IBM employee, you’re at Lotusphere because your livelihood depends on working with Lotus and IBM products,” he says. “You’re at this show to learn what’s going to happen to these products from the source and, if you’re lucky, to talk directly with a decision maker or developer. You come for that one opportunity, which you can’t get anywhere else, to walk up to a developer, open your laptop and show them a bug that’s driving you crazy or make an enhancement request. Or to bump into Kevin Cavanaugh or Craig Hayman or Mike Rhodin and say ‘you really messed this up’ or ‘great job on this feature.’”

So as a Lotus Notes Business Partner, Balaban spent the show digging for information like any other attendee. Did he ever follow an IBM employee into a rest room? “No,” he says. “But for fun, in the airport waiting for my flight home I would sneak up behind IBM employees I knew, grab their arms and say, ‘Can I ask you one more question?’”

Again taking the attendee perspective, Balaban sees Lotusphere 2007 as a critical year in the show’s recent resurgence.

“Lotusphere 2005 reassured people that Lotus Notes was here to stay, that it wasn’t going to morph into IBM Workplace,” he says. “Lotusphere 2006, which had a five-year high in attendance, fleshed out the vision for Lotus Notes/"Hannover" and showed people screens of what it will look like. Lotusphere 2007 is the ‘show me’ year – people are going to show up expecting to see working code, maybe not something they can take home but definitely something they can touch and dig into while they’re at the show. And if the mood of the IBM people involved with the show is any indication, it’s going to be a great show – I’m seeing a new level of enthusiasm from speakers, people staffing the labs, everyone.”

For his part, Balaban is working on taking the JumpStart track to another level. Traditionally these JumpStart sessions, held Sunday before the conference opens, have been two-hour introductions to technical topics covered in more detail during the week. “The idea has always been that if you have only the most basic understanding of, say, composite applications, you can attend a JumpStart on the topic to get the additional background you need to get something out of the more in-depth sessions on the topic,” he says.

Balaban wants to expand the JumpStart curriculum to include briefings on important industry issues facing attendees.

“For example, we might have sessions on Web services or SOA, explaining what they mean in the big picture for companies going forward,” he says. “These sessions would be the type of higher-level ‘marketecture’ you’d expect from analysts, technology and/or industry overviews that lay out what IBM but also what other companies and experts have to say about the topic, the underlying tools and techniques, and where things are headed.” Balaban hopes these sessions will lure marketing managers and other attendees who might not otherwise be attracted to JumpStarts.

In 2001, Balaban actually considered skipping the show. “I hadn’t started speaking again, so I had to pay the registration myself, and that’s a significant sum for a small business,” he says. “Plus, the week spent at Lotusphere was a week I wasn’t billing. The economy had turned down a bit, and I thought it just might be time to break my streak.”

In the end he decided to attend – in part because Lotusphere was still an excellent opportunity to generate business, but in larger part because Lotusphere was the one opportunity to catch up with virtually everyone in the collaboration business.

“There are people I don’t see any other time of year that I can absolutely count on seeing at Lotusphere,” he says. “And over the years we had established traditions I didn’t want to miss, such as meeting a group of my friends for sushi, or the Saturday night dinner hosted by the Penumbra Group that even IBM executives attended. But the real reason I decided to go was that everyone in the Lotus Notes business tries to get there. If you’re in the Lotus Notes business yourself, you can’t afford to pass that up.”